A chai latte at a café is usually a concentrate out of a carton, and the good ones are good because someone spent money on the concentrate. At home you don't need one. Strong tea, hot milk, and a syrup carrying the spice will get you there in about five minutes, and you get to decide how sweet it is — which is the part the carton takes away from you.

One honest note before the recipe: cardamom vanilla syrup isn't a chai syrup. Chai is a blend — cardamom, yes, but also ginger, cinnamon, clove, pepper. This is cardamom and vanilla, full stop. What it does is push the cardamom in your tea forward and round it off with vanilla, so a plain black tea drinks like something that took more effort than it did. If you want a full chai, brew chai and use the syrup to sweeten it. That's the version below.

What you'll need

• 6 oz strong hot black tea — chai or Assam, brewed double strength
• 1 oz Dave's Cardamom Vanilla Syrup
• 2 oz steamed milk, or oat milk
• A pinch of ground cinnamon
• Orange zest, optional but worth it

How to make it

1. Brew the tea hot and strong — two bags, or double the leaf, in 6 oz of water. Weak tea disappears under the milk.
2. Pour it into a 10–12 oz mug and stir in the syrup while it's still hot.
3. Steam or warm the milk and pour it in.
4. Dust with cinnamon, and express a strip of orange zest over the top if you have an orange sitting around. It takes two seconds and it's the difference between a nice drink and one people ask about.

Three ways to change it

Iced. Brew the tea double strength, stir the syrup in while it's hot so it dissolves, then chill it. Pour over ice and top with cold milk. Don't skip the hot-stir — syrup added to cold tea sinks and stays there.

Dirty chai. Add a shot of espresso. The cardamom sits comfortably against coffee, which is the whole reason we make this syrup in a coffee roastery. Any of our espresso blends work.

Sweeter or drier. 1 oz is our pour. Go to ¾ oz if you like tea to still taste like tea, or a full 1½ oz if you're used to café chai, which is sweeter than most people realize.

About the syrup

Dave's Cardamom Vanilla Syrup is steeped cardamom pods, real vanilla bean paste and pure cane sugar, made in small batches at our roastery in Rhode Island. No corn syrup, no artificial flavors, no colors. It's built to complement what it goes into rather than take it over — which is why it works in tea as easily as in coffee.

Customers keep finding uses we didn't put on the bottle: matcha, hot chocolate, over waffles, in shortbread. One told us it finally gave her back the cardamom coffee she used to buy in Middle Eastern shops in New York. That one we were glad to hear.

Want something with whiskey in it? Try the Cardamom Vanilla Old Fashioned, or browse all our syrup recipes.